Stylistics, pop culture, and educational research

This paper explores how educational research and stylistics, fields that rarely intersect, can be in closer dialogue in the study of pop culture texts, artefacts of interest to scholars in both disciplines. I establish in a systematized critical interpretive synthesis that educational research tends to treat pop culture texts as documents. I show that this in turn tends to drive content-focused analyses that stay, from a linguistic point of view, at the surface of the texts. In response, I offer a stylistic analysis of a pop culture text, an episode from the situation comedy The Big Bang Theory that features an English language learner. I employ conversation analysis to interpret the dialogue and demonstrate how a linguistic approach opens up readings on the discursive construction of phenomena such as belonging and exclusion.